All posts tagged Gamification

Gamification is already shaping up to be one of the buzzwords of 2011. Educators, brands, charities and government are all looking at how to use gamification to improve engagement, make money or change behaviors.

We are in the grip of gamification-mania. Rick Gibson of Games Investor Consulting says “Some analysts estimate that 50% of companies will have ‘gamified’ by 2015. That’s 13.5 million businesses in the U.S. alone. That seems pretty ambitious to me.”

But what is gamification? At the Digital Shoreditch Gamification Day today, the audience seemed to be confused about the distinction between making games, gamification and transmedia.

At this gamification conference, the room is divided by a total lack of a common language. For some, gamification is making an iPhone app that entertains, like Barclaycards Waterslide Extreme. (I would call that making an “adver-game”). For others, it is about brand extension (taking Coronation Street onto Facebook, for example). For yet another group, it’s about adding points and levels and badges to a website. To my mind, the latter is a basic example of gamification, but even then, not everyone would agree with me.

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